Thought I'd give an update FWIW for anyone who might get into the bootloop hell no matter what you try.
I went back to FastRX8 as recommended by IKnowSquat step 5Z and did the following:
Unzipped the flash_image, mtd-eng.img, and recovery.img to the SD card again. Went in to ADB and did following cmds
cat /sdcard/flash_image > /data/flash_image
chmod 755 /data/flash_image
/data/flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery.img
reboot recovery
It rebooted in to recovery and showed as "No Build Set" (no custom recovery yet) so I had straight Android recovery. From there I nand restored my last good setup.
It rebooted fine, put everything back where it should be. I then went to ROM Manager and did my Clockwork flash and Alternate RA recovery. To test then I quick booted into recovery and was in the custom RA. Flashed net kernal 4.18 and rebooted....everything went smoothly, even without doing wipes.
I'm hopeful that I'm "fixed" but who knows...fingers crossed and underwear changed
